Atlanta boater presumed dead in Fla.

By Christian Boone

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Florida officials have called off a search for an Atlanta native missing since Sunday afternoon, an apparent victim of Tropical Storm Claudette.

Donald Hoyt said his son, Cambren Hoyt, 45, is presumed dead. “He died trying to save others,” said the elder Hoyt, of Atlanta.

His son set sail into St. Andrew Bay early Sunday afternoon, just a few hours before Claudette was forecast to cross over the Florida Panhandle. Hoyt was joined on his newly purchased 37-foot Seidelman yacht by two recent acquaintances, Megan Mapletoft and Larry Phelps.

At roughly 5 p.m. CDT, the vessel grounded near Camel Back Shoal, several hundred yards off shore. A mayday call was sent out, but by the time the Coast Guard arrived Hoyt had gone for help in an inflatable dinghy. Mapletoft told the Panama City News-Herald she and Phelps pleaded with Hoyt to stay in the boat, but he refused.

“We were begging him: ‘What are you doing? What’s your game plan out there?’” Mapletoft recalled. “There was just no talking to him.”



Hoyt attempted to anchor, but by this point 30-40 knot winds had stirred waves three-to-four feet high.

“He was out in really, really rough water,” Mapletoft told the paper. “I don’t know why he did that. I guess as a boat owner he wanted to get his boat off that reef.”



Hoyt’s raft eventually drifted to Shell Island, an uninhabited seven-and-a-half mile parcel adjacent to St. Andrew’s State Recreational Area.

“[A rescue team] found some personal effects and footprints heading west,” said Stan Kirkland, spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “Then the footprints just stopped. It’s like he vanished into thin air.”

Though Claudette brought several inches of rain and heavy winds to Florida’s Gulf Coast, the damage to Shell Island was minimal, Kirkland said. It’s now believed Hoyt tried to swim across the Panama City Pass, a canal for large vessels roughly 90-to-100 yards wide and 50-to-100 feet deep.

“The tides are very strong,” Kirkland said. “A great swimmer in perfect conditions may be able to cross it, but in those conditions it would’ve been suicidal.”

Hoyt’s father believes his son, whose right lung was removed two years ago, attempted to make the swim because he was concerned about Mapletoft and Phelps. He had no way of knowing whether they had been rescued, and the winds were too strong to navigate the dinghy.

“He was trying to go north and the winds were blowing him due west,” Donald Hoyt said. “He was a very strong swimmer, and I’m sure he thought he could make it.”

The former iron worker, who once worked on a NASA launch pad, wasn’t one to shrink from a challenge, his father said.